One reason I bought in was in hopes that N4 could in some way connect to Reaktor and/or Reason via its various cv super-powers. I've got no hardware so no actual experience with or understanding of real-world cv, but I certainly have access to some very powerful virtual, internal cv-gen and cv-processing devices (Reason 10, and Reaktor 6, and now N4P) and can't help but wonder if they can, or could, talk to one another directly via virtual cv, maybe without needing converters, if at all.

Is this possible? Potentially useful? I've looked pretty long and hard for info on cv use totally in-the-box, and it's very hard to find. Searching 'cv' without getting buried in hardware talk is basically impossible, far as I can tell…

Anyone here doing anything like this, or have links to online chat about it? Fingers crossed that maybe THIS is the place…? (Altho I can't even search or tag with "cv" here; too short and too common!)

I hate it when people post to say they have little or no experience with the question at hand; guilty as charged. However...

I'd suggest you dig into the N4P docs to get a grip on what, conceptually, cv means in that world. It might be as simple as the distinction between integer and real numbers. As I recall, both MIDI and cv signals are reals, meaning they can have any value (within the limitations of the processor's architecture.) So, basically, you can play "in the cracks" on the keyboard.

Obviously, you will not be dealing with electrical voltages to an external hardware device, but -- again conceptually -- you will have pretty much the same level of granularity of control.

Open Sound Control is likely another stopping place, again a much more granular protocol than MIDI even if it is quite a bit higher up most learning curves. There's a fair amount of stuff available around the Reaktor environment that might give you some hints.

The new Reason is a tempting leap, but I personally have never used my v9 copy enough to justify it. Maybe if you come up with some compelling experiments, I'll be able to take another look.

As eenixon mentions, CV signals in Numerology are floating-point numbers -- i.e. the same values used for audio. Also like audio, it is a 'stream' of values instead of discrete messages (like MIDI or OSC). This is a very powerful way to represent an arbitrarily moving signal, but can be very much overkill for many types of musically useful signals -- like note numbers.

Here's a short guide to how to pick the most efficient, but still accurate way to send information around:

Use MIDI For: Medium resolution and medium update rates. Everything from note values, triggers and gates, and many, many synthesis parameters (frequency cutoff, LFO speed, etc). As tempting as it might be to use CV for everything, you can often get by with just MIDI -- and it works with just about anything. One thing to watch out for though: It isn't difficult to saturate a MIDI interface with Numerology-generated notes and CC messages -- but IAC busses are software are generally OK w/ high-data-rate MIDI.

Use N4 Pro's CV2Audio and a DC-capable audio interface for those cases where you really need both high resolution AND high update rates. On a modular system, this typically means audio-rate modulation of some sort -- say a fast LFO, or a weird quickly moving control source (wogglebug). With something like Reaktor, you can use and audio input and an envelope follower to convert an audio-rate control signal into something it can use internally.